Here is a list of things that Medieval Christians really believed about Jews: They murdered Christian babies. Both male and female Jews had periods, and they used Christian blood to replenish the losses. As punishment for murdering Jesus, they all suffered from hemorrhoids and open sores. Jews were all born blind, and they rubbed Christian blood over their eyes in order to see. Christian blood could protect one from leprosy. And so on.

No, really, there’s more.

In terms of groundless, unreasonable, and crazy beliefs about the world we live in, “blood libel,” as it’s called now, is certainly up there. But it’s important to point out that these things made perfect sense to Christians in the Middle Ages largely because their faith in the Bible — as the literal word of God — was strong. In John 8:44, Jesus himself says to the Jews: “Ye are of your father the devil, and the lusts of your father ye will do.” So on some level, if you accept that an entire class of people are the children of Satan, it’s not too far of a stretch to believe that they slathered their genitals with Christian blood to increase fertility. For someone whose faith is “strong,” in fact, it makes total sense.

Very few people today would argue that there is a rational basis for the hatred and anti-Semitic violence that accompanied these beliefs, and the overwhelming majority of us — present-day Christians included — would probably require something more than a Bible verse as reliable and falsifiable evidence of such allegations. After all, our modern concept of epistemology is nothing without intellectual developments like the scientific method or due process.

What this means, then, is that if religious practitioners of any sect expect to administer their faith in the public sphere — in a way that affects or oppresses the private lives of other people using physical or psychological harm — these so-called “faith communities” should not be exempt from providing reason and evidence for their allegations. The people demand it.

When it comes to the Dark Ages at least, I feel like everyone in America would agree on this.

Yesterday, soon after a state federal court overturned Proposition 8 — the California ballot initiative that banned same-sex marriage in 2008 — a conservative political group called the Concerned Women for America took to their website to express its outrage:

Citizens of California voted to uphold marriage because they understood the sacred nature of marriage and that homosexual activists use same-sex ‘marriage’ as a political juggernaut to indoctrinate young children in schools to reject their parent’s values and to harass, sue, and punish people who disagree. CWA stands in prayer for our nation as we continue to defend marriage as the holy union God created between one man and one woman.

Okay.

I chose this excerpt because it almost perfectly distills the anti-gay thrust of the Proposition 8 campaign into a single paragraph. For years now, the “protect traditional marriage” contingent have argued that their fight against same-sex marriage has been unfairly vilified as a hateful one. In their minds, or at least in their rhetoric, this is an argument about the “definition” of marriage. Technically, I agree with that last part.

I am a writer, and because of that, I am obsessed with words and their meaning. But this also means that I understand that language itself is a social contract, and that this contract — historically speaking — is not bound in perpetuity. For example, the word “citizen” as we use it in America has changed drastically over the last 150 years to include several classes of people — including African Americans and women — by whom the word did not originally intend to represent. But as far as I know, no one with any real political credibility is protesting such a radical “redefinition” of citizenship. Why is that?

The distinction is quite simple: This is not a fight over the definition of marriage. It is a fight over who owns the word.

The Concerned Women for America utilize the dominant discourse all over their press release, and I thought it was important to unpack this a little bit. To be clear, I should clarify that the “dominant discourse” is controlled by the dominant ideology — which, in this country, belongs to upper-class heterosexual Protestant white men. Theirs is the “standard” by which everything different is othered. For example:

• “Citizens of California voted to uphold marriage because they understood the sacred nature of marriage”: In this sentence alone, there are three important words to consider. The word “uphold” is utilized to imply a gold standard — enforcing the dominant normativity of “traditional” marriage. The word “sacred” is used to make the reader believe that marriage is not a civil invention, but a divine institution — enforcing the dominant normativity of Protestant values. And the word “nature” is used to imply that homosexuality is unnatural — enforcing the dominant normativity of heterosexuality. They said all of this, and yet they said none of this. That is the power of discourse.
• “…homosexual activists use same-sex ‘marriage’ as a political juggernaut to indoctrinate young children in schools to reject their parent’s values and to harass, sue, and punish people who disagree”: This is essentially 21st Century blood libel. Because theirs is an argument of faith that defies all reason, they hope that you, too, will take an unreasonable leap of faith alongside them. So in the same way that Jews were supposedly Christian baby-killers in the Middle Ages, today’s Christian wants you to believe that gays and lesbians want to kill your Christian babies with political “indoctrination.” In the same way that they once believed all Jews suffered from hemorrhoids, they now want you to believe all gay men have AIDS. And in the same way that Christians once believed that Jews used Christian blood for fertility, the Concerned Women of America want you to know that since gays and lesbians can’t biologically reproduce, they will “recruit” your children and compel them to “reject your values.” The libel has changed, but the method is straight out of the Dark Ages.
• “CWA stands in prayer for our nation as we continue to defend marriage as the holy union God created between one man and one woman.” This is the final and most important stake of their argument. It says, essentially, “You can’t redefine this word because God owns it.” Despite their occasionally futile attempts at recalling American history or putting words into the founding fathers’ mouths, the proponents of Proposition 8 ultimately hold this belief because, according to the Bible, marriage began with Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden: “Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and they shall become one flesh” (Genesis 2:23). While these groups are loathe to admit this in public, the legal argument is secondary to the theological one.

So if our modern epistemological proposal holds up against Christians in the Middle Ages, it must hold up today: If religious practitioners of any sect expect to administer their faith in the public sphere — in a way that affects or oppresses the private lives of other people using physical or psychological harm — they should not be exempt from providing reason and evidence for their allegations.

This is ultimately why there wasn’t a legal expert in the world who truly thought Proposition 8 would be upheld in that California courtroom: When Hak-Shing William Tam of the America Return to God Prayer Movement took the stand at the trial, for example, we learned of his claims that “homosexuals are twelve times more likely to molest children” and that the failure of Proposition 8 would “cause states, one by one, to fall into Satan’s hands.” When asked to provide reliable evidence for these allegations, Tam cited the National Association for Research & Therapy of Homosexuality — whose officer and scientific advisor, George Rekers, had just been caught traveling with a male prostitute. When asked to identify the source of his claim that same-sex marriage was linked to polygamy and incest, however, Tam was even more candid.

“The Internet,” he said.

Clearly, his faith in the Bible — as the literal word of God — was strong.

I’ve spent the better part of the week thinking about how we got here, and this is what I came up with. I got tired of hearing fake arguments and half-hearted rhetoric from the Proposition 8 camp who, when finally called upon to provide reliable evidence for their claims, brought absolutely nothing to the table. Like, literally nothing. They did not offer a single fact that advanced the idea that Proposition 8 was anything but a religious measure; they presented nothing to dismantle the notion that this was done out of anything other than antipathy for gays and lesbians. The scathing 138-page decision by Judge Vaughn R. Walker made that embarrassingly clear.

My problem then, for the last time, lies with the fact that we are somehow giving equal credence to an argument that stems from an unfalsifiable doctrine as we are to the amazing 80 “findings of fact” that Judge Walker outlines from the trial. I am confused because the attorneys for Proposition 8 really believed they could walk into a federal courtroom with a handful of platitudes about the “sanctity of traditional marriage” and walk away victorious. I am disheartened because the popular dialogue about this conversation is not calling it what it is: Proposition 8 is about the imposition of faith over reason.

I’m celebrating this victory, too, of course. But I am cautious. My evangelical Christian parents disowned their own son for being gay. I surely don’t expect any empathy from strangers.